At a store such as a supermarket where a number of products are displayed and sold, a tablet terminal or an information processing terminal such as a dedicated portable terminal is used for inventory management or an ordering process at the store in many cases. In this case, a person in charge such as a store clerk directly confirms a showcase at the store, and in a case where some products are short, the person in charge designates a target product and puts an order to replenish the product at that place using the portable information processing terminal.
Herein, in a case where the information processing terminal is configured to search the target product by inputting a search keyword such as a product name or a product code in order to designate an ordering product, there is a heavy burden on inputting information at that site and it is not easy to use that configuration. In particular, in a case where a touch panel such as the tablet terminal is employed as the terminal, the inputting is made by a software keyboard which may be cumbersome and difficult for the inputting.
Regarding such a problem, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. H5-94455 (Patent Document 1) discloses an ordering system which is used in a sales network where the products sold by a plurality of branch offices are commonly purchased by a head office. In this system, in the head office, a terminal master file is provided to store product data which is created based on product information and supplier information for each of the plurality of branch offices. Further, in the plurality of branch offices, there is provided a portable terminal which has a function of receiving and displaying the product information necessary for ordering the product from the head office, and a function of inputting an ordering quantity for each product and transmitting the ordering quantity to the head office. With this configuration, the products to be ordered at the time of putting an order can be sequentially displayed in the portable terminal in an order of shelf number, and the data entry can be made only by inputting the quantity.
In addition, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open Publication No. 2000-207449 (Patent Document 2) discloses a product image displaying/ordering apparatus including: an input device which is configured by a keyboard and a pointing device to display the ordering product and to put an order of the product; a storage device which stores the product information and information such as the product image; a data processing device which processes information such as the ordering of the product or the displaying of the product image based on the information stored in the storage device when a command is issued from the input device, and outputs a result; and an output device. With this configuration, the products are sequentially displayed in an order of arrangement in the product shelf, so that the ordering process can be smoothly performed.